Opinion: After the furore over data mining, should we really be surprised?

In this week’s opinion piece, Stephen McGroggan asks, in the wake of the furore over Facebook and how private data on millions of users was given to Cambridge Analytica, should we really be so surprised?

The Unanalysed Vote

With the recent concerns over Cambridge Analytica’s subversion of democracy through its mining of personal Facebook profiles to target voters in elections, we’ve been given an insight into the shady world of mass manipulation by means of the internet. But should we really be so surprised?

Is Fake news new?

Fake news is nothing new. So much so that it has its own grammar. Nouns have been invented to describe it – propaganda and disinformation are just two. The verb is to dissemble. It even has its own idiosyncratically partisan adjective, being Jesuitical with the truth. It predates the invention of the printing press, even to the time of the Ancient Greeks, as Plato bemoaned the myth and legends of the poets charming people into believing things which are not in fact true.

Subliminal adverts

We expect advertisements to bring us famous faces lying to us on a regular basis about their preferences. Subliminal adverts are used in everything from product placements to campaigning in French presidential elections. Hypnotic induction techniques such as point centring are commonly used in children’s television programmes to addict juvenile attention and create future consumers of the shows offshoots. The internet takes the spin to its next level, which at its worst excess amounts to a programme of brain washing.

Pornography streams through the internet exposing the immature to the images of sex at too early an age addicting a generation. On the other hand, children’s games are ironically repackaged for adults so that the next generation – and men in particular – are kept in a state of arrested development, never quite ready for the real world abroad. They are thereby more pliable and befuddled, unlikely to cause any problem to the status quo. Democratic decisions such as the votes for Brexit and Trump are augmented into national emergencies to keep people in a state of vague but certain panic, because a fearful crowd, like sheep, are easier to guide whichever way you want them to go.

Department of Education’s obsession with groupwork

The prevalent philosophy of education in this country aims at providing the individual student with certain transferable cognitive skills useful to himself, but also to society around him in turn, a society whose needs change in line with technological advancement.

The love of knowledge for knowledge’s sake has become a quaint vestigial artefact of an outdated mindset. The new Junior Cycle and the governmental focus on STEM subjects fit well within this cog-like utilitarian philosophy. The new focus on wellbeing will help deliver socially-adjusted minds to the workforce, ready to be useful and resilient (which is really code for ‘docile and uncomplaining, with few expectations of the State’). It should not be surprising that the Department of Education’s obsession with groupwork often enough leads to the growing problem of groupthink.

A culture of triviality

Against such a retreat from critical thinking towards a culture of acquiescence, triviality and hedonistic satiety, it is perhaps less surprising after all that the dangers of social networks and data collection on the internet are not seen more sharply in focus. People expose their private lives, their whereabouts and even pictures and details of their children on social networks.

Smartphone (Pic: Inside Ireland.ie)

Smart phone apps are even more obvious in the exchange that is involved for the otherwise free service – control of your phone and its contacts, photos and history, which presumably go somewhere. It is not unusual to be bombarded with internet adverts for just the thing you had been considering buying, without quite knowing when you imparted that information to the internet. Children’s toys that contact with the internet have been under legal investigation in Germany recently because of the possibility of these being used for spying.

Public Services Card

An example of the docility of the country to such breaches of privacy is the ease with which the government have been able to implement the roll out of the Public Services Card, which amounts to a national ID card. This is shown in the future requirement for a Public Services Card when applying for a new or replacement passport. Other countries civil liberty organisations have raised great campaigns against such ID cards, while we have once more accepted what has been asked of us. The danger of becoming complacent about such freedoms, is that whenever they no longer exist, it will be very hard to get them back.

Private

Visiting a synagogue in Budapest, I inquired of my tour guide how many Jews were still present in the city. The answer surprised me. She said they no longer kept those records since the War when the list of the synagogue was used by the SS to gather them up. It was decided that it was safer to keep some things private.

Paranoid

Such a view seems almost paranoid to our indoctrinated minds, which believe unless it is online, it is not happening. But it is not paranoid. It is healthy. The sickness is so ubiquitous in us that we no longer know it is sick, so long have we ignored the problem and normalised it.

But the fault is not in our stars, or even ultimately in the internet or its manipulators, it is in us.

If we are not discerning in how we come to our vote, we will deserve the government and, for that matter, the constitution that we get.

Stephen McGroggan is a writer based in Co Kildare.

The views expressed in our opinion pieces on those of the contributor and not necessarily of Inside Ireland.ie.

Inside Ireland

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